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le corbusier

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The scope of this book requires a word of explanation, since from a very simple purpose it has developed to a rather complicated issue. My intention had been to formulate the chief principles of classical design in architecture. I soon realised that in the present state of our thought no theory of art could be made convincing, or even clear, to any one not already persuaded of its truth. There may, at the present time, be a lack of architectural taste: there is, unfortuately, no lack of architectural opinion. Architecture, it is said, must be 'expressive of its purpose' or 'expressive of its true construction' or 'expressive of the materials it employs' or 'expressive of the national life' (whether noble or otherwise) or ' expressive of a noble life' (whether national or not); or expressive of the craftsman's temperament, or the owner's or the architect's, or, on the contrary, 'academic' and studiously indifferent to these factors. It must, we are told, be symmetrical, or it must be picturesque--that is, above all things, unsymmetrical. It must be 'traditional' and 'scholarly,' that is, resembling what has already been done by Greek, Roman, Mediaeval or Georgian architects, or it must be 'original' and 'spontaneous,' that is, it must be at pains to avoid this resemblance; or it must strike some happy compromise between these opposites; and so forth indefinitely.

If these axioms were frankly untrue, they would be easy to dismiss; if they were based on fully reasoned theories, they would be easy, at any rate, to discuss. They are neither. We have few 'fully reasoned' theories, and these, it will be seen, are flagrantly at variance with the facts to be explained. We subsist on a number of architectural habits, on scraps of tradition, on caprices and prejudices, and above all on this mass of more or less specious axioms, of half-truths, unrelated, uncriticised and often contradictory, by means of which there is no building so bad that it cannot with a little ingenuity be justified, or so good that it cannot plausibly be condemned.

Under these circumstances, discussion is almost impossible, and it is natural that criticism should become dogmatic. Yet dogmatic criticism is barren, and the history of architecture, robbed of any standard of value, is barren also.

It appears to me that if we desire any clearness in this matter, we are driven from a priori aesthetics to the history of taste, and from the history of taste to the history of ideas. It is, I believe, from a failure to appreciate the true relation of taste to ideas, and the influence which each has exerted on the other, that our present confusion has resulted.

I have attempted, consequently, in the very narrow field with which this book is concerned, to trace the natural history of our opinions, to discover how far upon their own premisses they are true or false, and to explain why, when false, they have yet remained plausible, powerful, and, to many minds, convincing.

5 Via delle Terme,
Florence,
February 14, 1914.

Preface Geoffrey Scott The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste 1914

Le Corbusier Maison Dom-ino 1914

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